If you expect to have success using video to market your law firm, you have to do more than upload a few videos to YouTube.
Ideally, your video creation process should be part of a well thought out process so that in a short period of time your viewers will know, like and trust you. Each video should serve to position you as the authority in your practice area and location. You want your prospective clients to subscribe to your channel, consume all of your videos, and engage with your via comments. At that point, when they call or email, you are a known and trusted adviser.
This process of adding written descriptions to your video and adding “tags” that will help search engines find your video and associate it with the search phrases potential clients enter into their browsers is called “optimization.” As far as artificial intelligence has come, we video marketers must make our videos findable.
In addition to optimizing individual videos, you should also optimize your home on the various channels that your video will appear. As YouTube is the biggest platform for online videos, it makes sense to put significant effort into creating a compelling YouTube channel landing page. Here are some of the steps we take to optimize our clients’ YouTube channels:
Currently Facebook is the second most important platform to post your videos. Like YouTube, you have the option of creating a video section with an introduction video, curated playlists and more.
Every time you upload a video, you also need to enhance that upload with written content. At a minimum this includes creating a blog post like description, adding words or phrases (tags) to tell the search engines what your video is about and adding hashtags (words or phrases preceded with the # sign) for better search.
Ideally the written description you add and the tags you add should correspond to the existing search traffic on that platform. Fortunately there are utilities available to us that will identify the words and phrases users like yours are already using to search for video content so we don’t have to guess.
YouTube now allows you to add “End Screens” and “Cards” where you can direct viewers to other videos or playlists, or to a page on your website or blog.
In addition to adding written content to make your video more findable, you can also improve your search presence with linking. This can take the form of linking out to pages on your website or to relevant pages on the Internet, and it can refer to creating or revising blog or website pages to include your newly uploaded video.
You can also use the multimedia aspect of your videos to approach other web publishers about publishing a guest post or article.
While YouTube and Facebook are the two largest destinations for your educational legal video, there are multiple other platforms where you can distribute your video content. AVVO gives you an opportunity to create video “guides” and LinkedIn gives you access to create posts or articles. You can also upload to Twitter and Instagram and you can tag others such as journalists, other lawyers or influencers to get your message out.
Finally, many of the platforms where you post your videos offer space for viewers to post comments and ask questions. Besides being a great opportunity to interact with viewers, you can include references in your responses to other videos, web pages, blog posts or articles on other platforms.
YouTube, Facebook and other platforms regularly change, adding or eliminating features. For example, YouTube End Screens and Cards are relatively recent developments that replaced an earlier annotation feature. This change was a result of Google/YouTube’s recognition that more people were watching videos on mobile devices and they needed to add mobile friendly, clickable technology.
About a year or so after that, YouTube changed the URLs of videos from http:// to https:// (insecure to secure links).
This also meant that we had to go back and retrofit hundreds of existing videos to take advantage of this new technology and to meet the security requirements of web browswers.
More recently YouTube added a requirement that we identify videos that are designed for children and to blur faces and remove identifying information. Generally speaking, law firm educational videos are not designed for children but we had to change the settings of the YouTube channels we manage to avoid delisting.
No doubt we will see other changes in some or all of the platforms we use to distribute our videos. Adapting to new requirements insures that our videos continue to be seen and that we do not run afoul of legal rules or platform requirements.
As you prepare for a video recording session, you may find yourself with writer’s block.…
As lawyers, most of us are very analytical people. In law school moot court, our…
If you have looked at my Social Security disability YouTube channel, you will see that…
The COVID-19 coronavirus crisis of 2020 is a unique event in American history. Literally, our…